Tom Hiddleston Talks Night Manager In EW Magazine…

From the moment John le Carre’s The Night Manager was published in 1993, producers have tried to bring the spy master’s tale about arms dealing to the big screen. But a film never materialized, and for good reason: time constraints. “This is a fabulous book,” says le Carre’s son, Night Manager exec producer Simon Cornwell. “It’s got a vast scope to it. It just doesn’t fit into two hours.” The story is finally getting what it deserves as a six-episode miniseries, starring Tom Hiddleston as MI-6 field agent Jonathan Pine and Hugh Laurie as Richard Roper, a morally ambiguous weapons dealer whom Pine is tasked with bringing down.

“The best way I can describe the story is the thriller equivalent of a bromance.” says exec producer Stephen Garrett. That isn’t to say that The Night Manager is female-free – updating the story for 2016, the producers gender-flipped the role of Pine’s MI-6 handler, Leonard Burr, into Angela Burr (Olivia Colman). Fittingly, Hiddleston and Laurie formed a bromance of their own during the project’s development and over the course of the intensive 76-day shoot, which took them to Morocco, Majorca, Switzerland, and London. “[Laurie] can’t address me by my real name,” Hiddleston says, “I sign off emails to him as ‘Pine’, and he addresses me as ‘Pine’. I don’t know why, but it makes us laugh.”